Structural properties of ideophones in kreyòl

Abstract

This paper analyzes the morphophonological, syntactic and semantic properties of ideophones in Kreyòl (Haitian Creole), lexical items that represents an idea in a sound. The theoretical basis follows Samarin (1965), Childs (1994a, 1994b), Dingemanse (2011), Costa (2017), among other authors. As for the methodological precepts, the investigation uses data collected from existing sources, especially Prou (2000) and Champion et al. (2015). A corpus of 81 ideophones was reanalyzed and reclassified based on three criteria for a word to be considered an ideophone in Kreyòl: (1) present onomatopoeic feature, (2) undergo (morph)phonological reduplication and (3) not have only nominal content. The revised corpus has 66 ideophones, which were processed in Excel and Dekereke software. Among the hypotheses raised, it is assumed that Haitian ideophones represent a marker of grammatical complexity, since their general characteristics indicate the use of different resources to express the same phenomenon. Furthermore, it is highlighted that morphophonology is the most productive area of analysis of Haitian ideophones. In general terms, the main characteristics of Haitian ideophones are: (1) for syntax – they tend to occur in declarative sentences, manifest in a medial and/or final syntactic position; (2) for morphophonology – they present varied morphophonological formats (A, A.A, A.B.B, A.B.C etc.); undergo total and partial reduplication, and morphological and phonological reduplication; they obey the existing vowel and consonant inventories in Kreyòl, as well as following the canonical syllabic structure (CV, CVC, CCV etc.); and (3) for semantics – they can be classified into different semantic macrocategories, the most expressive being: actions, sounds and movements.